Kate Millett

Kate Millett (Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1934 – Paris, 2017) was an American writer, educator, artist and radical feminist activist. She is closely associated with second-wave feminism, and her book Sexual Politics (1970) became one of the foundational texts of the movement in the English-speaking world. Her lasting importance lies in her argument that patriarchy is a historical and cultural system rather than something rooted in human nature.

She grew up in a modest Irish Catholic household in Saint Paul. She earned an English literature degree from the University of Minnesota in 1956, then went to St Hilda's College, Oxford, with help from a wealthy aunt. In 1958 she graduated with first-class honours, becoming the first American woman to earn that distinction there. For about a decade she moved between teaching and making art, working in sculpture and painting. She lived in Japan, where she met the sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, whom she married in 1965, and later taught at Barnard College, where she backed student rights. Her book Sexual Politics, which grew out of her doctoral work, read canonical novelists such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer with a critical eye, arguing that they presented a culturally produced sexism as if it were natural.

Millett joined the National Organization for Women in 1966 and later moved in radical feminist circles. After her book's success she found herself cast as a spokesperson for the movement, a role that brought tensions she described in Flying (1974), a memoir of her marriage and her relationships with women. Her writing ranged further than feminism. The Basement (1979) examined the real murder of the teenager Sylvia Likens, and The Loony-Bin Trip (1990) recounted her experience of bipolar disorder and psychiatric hospitals. Her later work turned to state-sanctioned torture in The Politics of Cruelty (1994). In the early 1970s she began buying and restoring property near Poughkeepsie, New York, a project that became a community for women artists and writers.

Her legacy lies in the lasting argument that gender is a political category, comparable to class and race. She died in Paris on 6 September 2017, eight days before her 83rd birthday, with her wife, Sophie Keir, at her side.